Lornah Kiplagat

Inventing Herself and a Better World

"Someone must speak out for the little girl with no voice. And since I began as a nomad just like them, I felt it was my destiny to help them."[Waris Dirie in Desert Flower, Lornah Kiplagat’s favorite book]

Her happiness pervades the atmosphere around her. She smiles easily, asks questions of others, makes people feel special.

"Everyone loves Lornah," says Mary Wittenberg, CEO of the New York Road Runners. "Lornah has a good time."

"All my people love hanging out with her," says Rafy Acosta, director of the World’s Best 10K. "My wife loves her. She has been such a perfect guest and a perfect friend. She is a great athlete and a great human being."

Some of this joy stems from success: Lornah won 10 out of 12 road races she entered last year, even though she was "taking it easy." Lornah’s happiness, however, goes well beyond athletic achievement.

"Lornah has a force about her," says Wittenberg. "When I think about Lornah, it is beyond sports. In the midst of her career, she has been able to focus on community, on others. Lornah has a bigger picture of life."

Lornah has the happiness of someone who knows who she is. She has chosen nearly everything about herself—her name, her nationality, her home, her profession, her persona—yet without repudiating her past or alienating her family, friends, neighbors and countrymen. She has become a global woman, equally at ease in rural Kenya, the center of New York City, or a comfortable suburb in Holland or the USA.

Mostly, Lornah has the happiness of one who has made her own dreams come true and helped others learn to dream and bring their dreams to life as well.

Born May 1, 1974, she was called, following the local Kenyan naming tradition, "Jebiwot," or "girl born while it was raining," as it was the rainy season. Her father, one of the oldest men in the village, held to the old traditions. Most untraditionally, however, from Lornah’s earliest memory he divided work between the boys and girls of his large family. As Lornah recalled in a PBS Frontline interview, he even went so far as to tell her, "If I see you doing something like washing clothes for your brother, I will break your hands."

Thus encouraged, young Jebiwot developed into an uppity woman. She recalls, "as a child, if I was doing something like washing, and my brother would ask me, ‘Where are the cows?’ [a common scene in male-dominated Kenyan society, she reports], I would say, ‘You’re asking me, while I’m working? You are doing nothing, you go look for the cows!’." Years later, in training camps, she refused the task of washing the men’s muddy shoes and socks, commonly the duty of female runners. And one day, she would direct the building of her own training camp, telling construction foremen when they showed up, "I’m your boss. If you can’t handle that, go." Some went.

Jebiwot grew up in the small village of Kabiemit—a place she says is "not even a village," just "several houses"—taking care of animals on her family’s farm. She knew of runners: An uncle ran in the 1972 Olympics and several other world-class runners came from her region. But it was her cousin, Susan Sirma—the first Kenyan woman to win a medal in a World Championship and one of the top road racers of the early 1990s—who really inspired her. Sirma was "something special," Lornah says. "She had run abroad, and when she came home, to see her . . . to see her train. . . I would start to shake. It was like, ‘Wow!’ We sang songs about her. We would walk around her house. When I would run after a goat, I would think, ‘Run like Susan.’ Susan was like a really big thing."

Of her childhood, Lornah remembers, "If I was sent somewhere, I was never walking, always running." Like many Kenyan youth, she ran five to eight kilometers to school and back twice a day. At noon, they would run home for lunch, the limited time requiring them to race back fast enough that they "had to concentrate." Yet young Jebiwot never even thought about running competitively, never considered herself a runner, until a few "small, small things" turned her in that direction.

She recalls a day in sixth grade when a cousin was looking at her legs and asked, "Are you running? Have you considered running?" When she said no, the cousin said, "You should try," pointing out that the arch of her foot was "formed like a runner." "Since that time," Lornah says, "I was motivated. I felt like I had the qualities of a runner."

She remembers another day, a school competition when her parents came to see her run the 10,000m and a relay. She recalls the pressure of having spectators and of feeling a bit heavy from the beans and corn she ate at lunch, but also the pleasure of doing well and the realization that it was "so much fun."

Years later, she remembers the first day that she hung with Sirma—who had once told another cousin that Lornah was too big for a runner and should pursue the shot put—for a full hour’s training run. Normally Lornah would be dropped after ten or 20 minutes. Lornah recalls, "After the run, Susan was resting her hands on her knees, and looked over at me and said, ‘Wow. If you can run like this. . .’"

The rest, as they say, is history. But history is seldom simple.

Lornah with girls at her High Altitude Training Center in Iten, Kenya, built and supported with winnings from her road racing success.Guillano De Portu/PRIMERA HORA FILE

Even after beginning to see herself as a runner, Jebiwot was working to define herself. When the time came for her to choose her own name, as was the custom in seventh grade when she first registered for national exams, she delayed rather than lock in one that wasn’t right. Throughout secondary school she played with other names: Clara, Merriam, Josephine. Each was tried for a few months, but none quite fit. Finally, at 17, she chose Lornah, primarily because it was unusual, so she wouldn’t have to share.

"It is a fun thing," she says, "giving yourself a name." As to where the name Lornah came from, she says, "I don’t know. Don’t ask me!" Wherever it originated, it turned out to be appropriate for the woman she became, a name that sounds both familiar and vaguely foreign in any country. At home, however, everyone still calls her "Jebii."

About the time Lornah was settling on a name, she was having to chose a career path. Having done well in school, she received a scholarship to study medicine in India. While education was important to her, and she didn’t see herself working in rural Kenya without an education, she worried about a cousin who had gone to study in India and came back mentally ill. "If I go to India, will I become like him?" she wondered.

Instead of going, she snuck out from home one night. "I had to think about what to do," she recalls. She took a bus 100 miles to the house of Sirma’s brother in Nakuru. There she spent the next few years as a housemaid, fitting training around her duties cleaning and caring for children, a schedule that had her up at 5:30 a.m. and in bed no earlier than 10:00 p.m.

It was during this time that Lornah, with funds borrowed from friends and relatives, took a bus more than 200 miles to the capitol, Nairobi, to run the national cross country championship. Arriving in the evening, lost in the big city with no money, she found the race site and snuck into a public toilet to spend the night, as the tents around the grounds were all for men. The next day, without a breakfast, she placed sixth.

After Lornah had proven her ability in training and competition, in 1994 Sirma helped obtain a ticket to London from the agent Kim McDonald. But, like the girl choosing her name, Lornah knew she was not yet ready and turned it down. Susan said she was "sick in the head."

The right opportunities did come, eventually, and Lornah moved to Germany in 1996, running for a small agent. It soon became clear that she needed bigger races and a more professional agent, and she moved to one known for his successful women athletes.

But even this camp wasn’t ready for Lornah—or she for it. She recalls incidents such as traveling alone to Los Angeles in 1997—her first trip to the U.S.—and finding out when she arrived that the race she was scheduled to run was a marathon. She won, nonetheless. In the coming year, the pattern was repeated: being told when and where to race for financial considerations, even being told on Friday that she had a race on Saturday. Lornah balked. She wanted to be able to control her schedule and her money, and not just follow instructions like a good African woman.

Lornah with students from PS 69 in the Bronx, NY, at the ING Run for Something Better cllinic.New York Road Runners

The turning point, however, came when she discovered that other athletes had told the Kenyan federation that she was not in good enough shape to be on the team for the world half marathon championship in 1997, despite strong training and success in races. "I was so disappointed," Lornah says, "I wanted to go back to school. I really never had something like that."

Instead of going home, she began running for Dutchman Pieter Langerhorst, whom she knew through her Saucony sponsorship. Lornah and Pieter became friends, partners, and now husband and wife.

Pieter has become Lornah’s true partner as she has developed into the woman she was destined to be, both as an athlete and as a leader. Lornah officially became a Dutch citizen in 2003. Unlike those accused of chasing dollars, the move was economically detrimental, as the tax rate in Holland is 52 percent. But Lornah wanted to do it out of respect for her husband and her new home, to be able to thank the Dutch by representing them in international competition. This is respected and understood at home in Kenya as well. One wonders if Pieter didn’t unofficially become Kenyan long before that, as both live and thrive in either place.

As early as 1997, with her first race earnings, Lornah built a house for her parents, then bought a plot of land in Iten, Kenya, with an idea in her mind to build a camp for girls. "It is very hard for young girls to have a breakthrough in Kenya," Lornah speaks from experience. "I wanted to really change things." With her increased racing proceeds and Pieter’s help, the High Altitude Training Center opened in the spring of 2000.

Today the camp—the largest in Kenya, with 23 rooms, a fitness center, a clinic for physiotherapy and a conference center— boasts such graduates as Hilda Kibet, who is a world class road racer and a successful physiotherapist in Holland. But Pieter and Lornah don’t dwell on times and athletic success much when they talk about the center. Instead, they delight in stories of girls who, when they arrive, can barely talk due to shyness, and cover their eyes in shock and shame when they see a male runner mopping the floors. Within two to four months, however, these same girls greet them confidently with "Hey, man," and participate in the decision making and delegating of responsibilities at the camp.

Even farther reaching, they have noted that other camps are changing how they treat women—paying for school and not overworking them on and off the track. John Manners, an expert writer on Kenyan runners since he was a Peace Corps teacher in the 1970s, says, "Lornah was the first to really put her money where her mouth was with her investment in the training center. There is a qualitative difference between her camp and others. Her work is contributing to a dawning consciousness among Kenyan women that they can be treated better."

Lornah and Pieter are also quite proud of the international clientele that the center is attracting. "Two years ago at Christmas we had 25 nationalities represented" Pieter brags. The westerners pay for their stay, while all Africans are free. Manners notes that it is the wazungu [white foreigners], however, who are "the primary beneficiaries." He sees the camp as "part of a growing nexus of Kenyan tourism" where Iten is becoming an international running center. Pieter agrees, noting that "foreigners and Africans have a lot to learn from each other."

The camp is now managed entirely by Lornah’s sister, Monica. "More or less, my success is due to Pieter and my sister," Lornah says. "Everything is working. I don’t worry about it anymore. It feels nice."

With the camp running smoothly, Lornah is free to chase other dreams. Those dreams involve competing at the top for at least three more years, with her eyes on the 2008 Olympics. "It is my last chance to compete at the highest level," Lornah says, adding, "I don’t know yet in what event." The marathon, as the only road event, seems logical, but Lornah has had trouble with asthma in several 26.2-milers, including last fall’s ING New York City Marathon.

If she makes it to Beijing, and all evidence points to that as likely, she’ll have fans on at least two continents. The Dutch have embraced her and the Kenyans still love her. During the 2004 Olympics, she was told of people walking for miles and arriving up to five hours early to watch her on the television of a neighbor in her home village. And she recalls a text message she received from Kenya that said, "Your success is our success."

"It made me think," Lornah says, "Do I shine? It’s nice. They care."

She does shine. No more so than when she is at ease, joking with Pieter. After discussing his athletic past as a triathlete, he says he now just runs for fun a few times a week. Lornah chimes in, "He can’t get serious about training, or else, who will cook?" She slaps his leg, throws her head back and laughs. Laughs at her audacity. Laughs at her luck. Laughs the laugh of a happy woman.

The High Altitude Training Center is open to athletes of all levels, from anywhere in the world. Find more information about Lornah and her Training Camp here.